Anne looked at the construct and shivered.
A movement in the futures made me turn. Richard had appeared in the hallway. He looked at the ruins of his front porch, then up at me. “Your doing?”
“No.”
“Then whose?”
I wanted to ask if he didn’t know everything already, but thought better of it. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Who lives around here, uses disintegration spells, and really doesn’t like me?”
Richard’s eyes narrowed and I felt a flash of fear, but the next moment his face was smooth again. “Move along, please.”
“Are you going to—?”
“You are not my Chosen, Alex.” Richard’s voice was level, but his eyes stayed fixed on me. “Do not take liberties.”
Anne looked at me, and I held my tongue. We walked away down the hillside. The dama watched us go.
chapter 2
Only when we were most of the way down into the valley did I begin to relax. I’d searched for danger in all the futures that I could see and found nothing. “I suppose that was the something worse,” Anne said at last.
“I think you’re being optimistic.”
A cold wind blew across the hillside, making the grass ripple and Anne’s hair flutter, and I shivered. The fight hadn’t been long enough for me to warm up. “Keep scanning with your lifesight,” I said. “We’re not out yet.”
“Was that Rachel?”
“Safe bet,” I said. Rachel is the other survivor of Richard’s apprentices, though she goes by Deleo now. Disintegration is her speciality and she really hates me. Anne’s never met Rachel, but she’s heard the stories.
“Why didn’t you see her coming earlier?”
I looked at Anne and she coloured slightly. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she added. “It’s just that you can usually—”
“Spot things further ahead,” I said, and sighed. “Yeah, that’s one of the problems with divination. The crazier someone is, the less predictable they are.”
“I thought Rachel was Richard’s Chosen,” Anne said. “If he wanted us here . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. Now that I thought about it, that flash of anger had been the only moment today that Richard hadn’t seemed in control. Maybe Richard had ordered Rachel not to attack us, and she’d disobeyed. If that was true, it was the first crack we’d been able to find in Richard’s forces. Was there some way to exploit that?
“You were thinking of using that knife on him, weren’t you?” Anne asked.
“Was it that obvious?”
“I saw your adrenaline levels,” Anne said. “You were gearing up for a fight, then . . .”
“It wasn’t the right time,” I said. “Maybe it’ll never be, but . . .” I shook my head. “What did you see when you looked at him?”
Anne frowned, diverted. “He’s . . . strange.”
I looked at Anne. “Strange how?”
“He’s human,” Anne said. “But his body seems . . . enhanced, somehow? It’s like there’s more output than there should be input. I’d have guessed it was a boosted metabolism or something, but those accelerate aging, and he looks like the opposite if anything. From his bones he has to be fifty at least, but he’s got the cellular and muscular structure of a man of thirty.”
“Longevity magic?”
“I think so, but not one I’ve seen.” Anne looked up at me. “You never did tell us Richard’s magic type.”
“That’s because he doesn’t give it away,” I said. “Uses items and general spells . . .” I trailed off as a movement in the futures caught my attention. We were halfway up the other side of the valley and almost to the trees, but as I looked ahead I saw that the woods we were about to enter weren’t empty. “We’re about to have company,” I said. “Someone in the trees.”
Anne looked upwards towards the tree line, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Hostile?”
“No, or I would have seen earlier. What can you see?”
“It’s just one,” Anne said after a moment’s pause. “Male, early twenties. He’s healthy, I think . . . oh.”
“What?”
“He’s got an artificial leg,” Anne said. “Left side from the knee down. Might be a construct graft.”
“Anyone you know?”
“I’d remember something like that.”
I’d had time to check out the futures more thoroughly, and I was as certain as I could be that the person waiting for us wasn’t here to fight. “Then let’s see what he has to say.”
The guy waiting for us wasn’t hiding. As we entered the woods he stepped out from behind a tree, keeping his hands in plain view. Tall and athletic, with blue eyes and a crew cut, he had the look of a fighter but wasn’t carrying any weapons or magic items that I could see. There was a woven bracelet on his wrist. “My boss wants to talk to you,” he told the two of us.
Anne had come to a stop and was staring at the guy. I wasn’t quite sure why—okay, he could have been good-looking, but I wouldn’t have thought Anne was the kind to get caught up on that. “You had anything to do with that?” I asked, jerking my head back towards the distant debris across the valley.
“Wouldn’t be hanging around if I had.”
“So what, you stood around and watched?” I said dryly.
Crew Cut shrugged. “You did all right.”
“Who are you?” Anne asked.
“Just the messenger.” Crew Cut nodded back over his shoulder. “My boss is a quarter mile that way. He says you’ll be able to find him.”
I noticed that he hadn’t asked who either of us were. I was more interested in how he’d known that we’d be coming here. “And how did you—?” I began.
“I know you,” Anne said suddenly.
Crew Cut looked back at Anne, then to my surprise dropped his eyes. “Two and a half years ago,” Anne said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
I glanced at Anne. “You know this guy?”
“So do you,” Anne said. “He tried to kill you.”
“Doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“As in, more than once.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Three years ago.”
“More specific.”
“In the summer.”
“More specific.”
“Oh, come on,” Anne said in exasperation. “Your memory’s not that bad. The Nightstalkers. Remember?”
“I don’t—” I started to say, then stopped. The Nightstalkers had been a group of adept vigilantes looking for vengeance on Dark mages in general and Richard’s apprentices in particular, and by the time they arrived on the scene, the only apprentices of Richard still alive had been Rachel and me. They did okay against me and really badly against Rachel. Most of them had died in the basement of the mansion behind us.
But now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen all of them die. A seeker adept called Lee had escaped. And there’d been another, a weapons and explosives expert, who’d gone by the name of . . .
“Kyle,” I said, and saw the slight reaction on Crew Cut’s face. “That was your name, wasn’t it?”
“Still is,” Kyle said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll admit, having you talking to me rather than trying to cut me in half with a sword is an improvement. However, given that the last time I saw you, you were trying to shoot me, I’m not too inclined to follow anywhere you lead.”
“Not just you,” Anne said. “He nearly killed me as well.”
A trace of embarrassment showed on Kyle’s face. “That was an accident.”
“You put a bomb on the roof of the flat we were sleeping in!”
“It wasn’t aimed at you,” Kyle said.
“Yeah, you’re kind of just digging yourself deeper at this point,” I said.